Flamboyant gloves make for an interesting interface design breakthrough

This is freaking awesome: Two MIT guys, sixth-year grad student Robert Y. Wang of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and Associate Professor Jovan Popovic, have come up with a brilliant and inexpensive hand-tracking interface. It's basically just a webcam and a flamboyantly-colored glove, the kind of thing a football player would beat you up for wearing in a small-town conservative high school:
For interested parties, Wang and Popovic have tons-o'-videos showing proof of concept and different applications of the technology here.
Any chance this will see mainstream application? Perhaps--Popovic's also a Senior Research Scientist at Adobe! Photoshop gloves, anyone?

The latest design news, jobs & events. Straight to you every other week.

Join over 300,000 designers who stay up-to-date with the Core77 newsletter...

1 Comment

I understand the multi-colors are for the computer to pickup on easier, but couldn't you do the same with one color or light variations of the same color and materials that the camera can see, but are not that noticeable to the human eye?
One type of material would be an IR reflective surface. There may be a need for an IR source for the camera to read, but it could work.

The iPhone 4 has received it's fair share of criticism (and lawsuits?) due to a design flaw where holding the phone a certain way causes dropped calls and lowered reception strength. Yesterday Steve Jobs supposedly said, "We're working on it..." and today, the "Death Grip" problem is being acknowledged on...

Damon Millar is developing a new way to think about CAD. Instead of using abstract, geometric modeling tools to create a form to be output by highly flexible, axis-based, CNC tools, PhysicalCAD invites the user to manipulate blanks of material with virtual tools like lathes, chisels and drills to create...

What's that photo of? Self-folding origami! Well, kind of. The Soft Robotics "Programmable Matter" developed by researchers at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory under Professor Robert Wood consists of a sheet material lined with actuators. Which essentially means the darn things can fold themselves up in a predetermined way.The HML guys'...

The result of 'Six-Forty by Four-Eighty' is not 30.72, it is a mesmerizing combination of computation and design. For the last edition of Design Miami/Basel, American Jamie Zigelbaum and Brazilian Marcelo Coelho created a multidisciplinary piece that was the most intriguing of all. In a pitch dark room, 220 colorful...